This invention relates generally to cable fault measurements, and in particular to correction of loss and dispersion in cable fault measurements.
In testing and troubleshooting electrical cables, which may be either single-wire cables or twisted-wire pairs, a typical test involves using test instruments that transmit stimulus signals into one end of a cable and receive and measure any reflections that return. Both time-domain reflectometry (TDR) and time-domain crosstalk (TDX) measurements are subject to two major types of distortion. One is attenuation distortion and the other is dispersion distortion.
Attenuation distortion is due to losses in a cable. That is, energy is lost as a stimulus signal propagates down a cable under test and then is reflected back to the test instrument, with the result being that received signals become smaller in magnitude to the point they may no longer be discernible.
One prior art method of correcting attenuation distortion is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,698,985 to Jeffrey S. Bottman, where a reflected response is scaled in the time domain by multiplying the response by a weighting function to compensate for attenuation. That is, the attenuated signals are “boosted” or amplified proportionately over the length of the cable by multiplying each point of the response by a predetermined weighting function. Because the weighting function corrects only for attenuation and not for dispersion, this method is prone to inaccuracies.
Another prior art method of correcting attenuation distortion is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,437,578 to Linley F. Gumm, wherein cable loss is corrected on a point-by-point basis wherein for each point several Fourier transforms are performed to shift back and forth between the frequency and time domains as calculations are being performed. That is, data acquired in the frequency domain is Fourier transformed to the time domain to provide an impulse response for the cable. Then each point is transformed back to the frequency domain while correcting each point based on distance and frequency. The corrected data is then transformed back to the time domain so that the correction can be observed. However, for a record length of only 2048 points, 4.2 million calculations are required. Further, this method also corrects only for attenuation, and not for dispersion.
The second type of distortion, dispersion distortion, results from the fact that the different frequency components of the stimulus signals and reflections propagate through the cable at different speeds. Dispersion distortion causes reflected pulses to become wider, or “smeared.”
Both attenuation distortion and dispersion distortion are inherent in the characteristics of cables, and both are present at the same time. The effect of these distortions is reduce the instrument operator's ability to recognize “events” or faults in the cable. The pulse returned from an event could be so small that it could not be discerned. Further, the smearing of the responses from closely spaced multiple events could make their returned pulses overlap and appear to be from a single event.
It would be desirable to provide a method of reliably and quickly correcting both attenuation distortion and dispersion distortion.